Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

The Venezuelan political scientist, Professor Edgardo Lander, wrote of the current climate crisis, stating:

The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interest of financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society profit is more important than life.

That profound statement will be utterly vindicated in the context of this Bill unless the current shoddy form in which it is being brought the House is dramatically stood on its head.

As many Deputies already highlighted, there are five glaring deficiencies in the proposed Bill and there is a bigger problem in terms of the way in which we look at climate change. First, as the other Deputies have said, it does not set a simple emission target for 2050. How can one measure progress if one does not know what one is starting out with? We have no definition of a low-carbon economy. Whatever you are having yourself is more or less the approach the Government is adopting.

Other Deputies referred to the fact the Bill does not allow the expert advisory council to be fully independent. We have had enough political interference, potentially, in so many aspects of the State. We certainly do not need it in this regard, or that such a body would be at the whim of the majority political grouping of the day, particularly when we are dealing with a situation where the interests of the powerful are generally diametrically opposed to the interests of the rest of humanity. This is one of the problems when we look at this. It is not a case of balancing interests or a rising tide lifts all boats. The root of the climate change problem is that the interests of the wealthy are opposed to the interests of the majority and unless one factors that in in dealing with climate change, it will not be done appropriately.

The other Deputies dealt well with the points about climate justice being entirely absent from the Bill. It is a scandalous situation for a country such as Ireland, that prided itself on its benevolence around the world and its neutrality, that it is one of the worse polluters per capitain the world and has benefited from the gross exploitation of others. Those who are suffering the most are the least to blame for this situation and we must acknowledge that we are responsible for our role in some of the poorest countries in the world which, as we speak, are fighting for their existence.

As other Deputies have said, one of the most cowardly aspects of this Bill is that it passes the matter on to the next Government, which is, to be honest, becoming a real ploy of this Government. They will tackle nothing. Everything is for the responsibility of the next Government, which will lead many to ask what is the point in having them here in the first place because the deadline for the next climate plan is 2017. Already this plan is years too late. We will not, even now, have a plan. It is putting us in the position of being internationally humiliated, but international humiliation is par for the course as well when the Government is quite content to parade this country as one which is happy to ignore human rights law and violate human rights despite all the best advice. I suppose we would be naive if we expected anything more in an approach on climate change.

We must radically stand policies on their head. We must start by saying that we must achieve targets, by 2020, 2030 and 2050, to which we have a direct and legally-binding obligation, apart from a moral one. We must stand on its head the way we operate.

The problem with the approach we have taken was summed up by the points made by Deputy O'Dowd, that it is all our fault, for instance, that I will drive home in my car, and I will not cycle out to Swords or will not get the bus, is my fault. It is a bus route that has been decimated under this Government and it would take me an hour and a half to get home. It is not practical for those living in this city to manage on a system that has been fatally underinvested in. One cannot run a city on private cars but that is what many have been driven to because of the consistent lack of subvention for public transport and the lack of delivery of a decent rail infrastructure to the airport and beyond, to one of the fastest growing areas in Europe. Suggesting getting on one's bike does not work in the context of some of the policies that this Government has put forward. It is sickening that Deputy O'Dowd has no problem in entertaining Shell, one of the biggest polluters on the planet, and yet wants us all driving around in electric cars, and in entertaining fracking and then blaming ordinary people for the crisis. It is just not good enough. This is one of the reasons we are in this situation.

We need a complete overhaul of how we do everything, and that starts with planning and the interconnection between Departments. We state on paper that we will have sustainable communities but instead we build them in a format that leaves residents with no alternative but to get into a car. Over decades we perpetuate policies where billions of euro have been put into road transport. Even now, tens of millions of euro are given to National Toll Roads to pay for that set up when there is underinvestment in public transport the likes of which no other European economy has done. It means looking at the planning system and building schools and local facilities near where people live. There is no point in building housing estates in the middle of nowhere with no public transport and then blaming parents for having to get into a car to bring their children to school. All of these matters must be integrated. We need to look at a land management strategy that discourages sprawl and encourages low-energy forms of agriculture etc.

Ms Naomi Klein summed it up well when she wrote, we "need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifices to offset the excessive consumption of the rich." That is at the heart of this. We talk about the important concept that the polluter pays but, in Ireland, that has been bastardised to mean attacking ordinary people and ignoring that it is the wealthy in society who are the biggest polluters. According to the Princeton Environmental Institute, the top 500 million richest people on earth are responsible for over half of the world's carbon emissions. That is where we must start, if we are to have a meaningful debate. Progressive taxation, which taxes the millionaires and billionaires, has climate justice at its heart. We do not have enough time to debate the points.

The development of renewable energy, particularly in the area of wave power, in the context of Ireland will not be done by the private sector. On this issue, the State must take the helm and lead. We have, maybe, ten companies trying to develop prototypes, and they all are too small.

It is not a viable operation for them. We need to buy the intellectual property rights from those people-----

See this speech in context